Industrial trucks, such as forklift trucks, reach trucks, pallet jacks, and automated guided vehicles, are widely used in manufacturing and distribution facilities for moving and storing materials within a warehouse as well as for loading and unloading of trucks. Most of the industrial trucks used in warehouses and distribution facilities are electric, typically powered by batteries. These batteries are referred to as traction to motive power batteries.
In order to maximize utilization and efficiency of industrial trucks in manufacturing and distribution facilities, fleet management systems can be employed. Fleet management systems provide various operational data for industrial truck fleets such as location and movement of trucks, when trucks are in motion and when they are at rest, energy usage (amp-hour or kWhrs), and many other performance and operational data. Most of the fleet management systems employ various sensors to monitor truck operation, which are linked to monitoring and management devices installed on each truck. The monitoring and management devices are typically linked wirelessly to local or remote servers that run software to analyze and report various fleet performance data.
Monitoring of industrial batteries, on the other hand, may also be desirable in order to ensure proper battery health and performance. The battery monitor may typically incorporate a microprocessor, memory for data storage, sensing circuitry, and some wired or wireless interface to set up the unit and download stored parameters. The battery monitor measures and stores battery voltage, battery current, battery temperature, and battery amp-hours throughout charge and discharge (use) cycles. In addition, various settings are typically stored in these battery monitoring units including battery size, nameplate rating, battery ID and the battery serial number among other things. Data is typically retrieved through wired or wireless connection and can be uploaded to local or remote servers to generate reports and analytics. The cost of battery monitoring devices is typically low, as compared to fleet management systems.
Although some truck fleet management systems do also integrate battery sensors to collect battery data and report battery performance metrics through the fleet management system, the overall cost of deploying such fleet management systems is relatively high due to their relatively high monthly subscription costs and as such, their adoption has been limited to customers with large truck fleets and/or large geographical footprint. On the other hand, having two management systems, one for truck fleets and another for battery systems can be cumbersome.
Due to the limitations of many of the existing truck fleet management systems and battery monitoring systems, further improvements may be desirable for an integrated cloud based truck and battery fleet management system.